Big Water, Big Grass (or...when ignorance really is bliss)

During the first weekend of November, my parents, my aunt, my cousin, and I headed up to Maumee Bay State Park and Lodge near Toledo, Ohio to kick off the winter. It's been a tradition of ours to head north for the last hurrah of fall so we can experience Big Water, go hiking, and do a lot of laughing. Each year we tend to focus on a piece of natural history in the area, and this year it was the tall grasses or reeds that line the boardwalk in the marsh...

Behemoth grasses (Phragmites australis) line the boardwalk in the wetlands at Maumee Bay State Park. The reeds are outrageously beautiful, but the beauty comes at a price...a non-native monoculture that is choking out native plants.

Non-native Phragmites (Phragmites australis), the common reed
We had no idea what this sea of grass was as we walked through it. Down in Cincinnati we're not exposed to grasses that live near Big Water, so when we were walking through the towering reeds with their feathery plumes backlit in the late-afternoon sun, we didn't know it was a bad thing. We just knew it was breathtakingly beautiful, especially when the autumn breezes swept through the fronds, tossing them, and swirling them in one fluid motion...but unfortunately, the 15-ft tall plants are a non-native, invasive species that is slowly choking the life out of biodiverse coastal marshes and wetlands. As phragmites rushes through a wetland, it creates a monoculture in its wake, creating dense thickets that squeeze out native plants such as cattails.

A sea of common reeds is beautiful from the observation deck on the boardwalk in the coastal wetlands of Lake Erie.
If only it were supposed to be there... 

Phragmites australis, the common reed, along the Lake Erie coast.

We loved walking the boardwalk at Maumee Bay State Lodge. It winds through a wet woods that was filled with migrating White-crowned Sparrows and then pushes through an expansive marsh where Red-winged Blackbirds were gathering.

Even though the reeds have squeezed out many of the native plants, a small flock of Black-capped Chickadees didn't mind, and it melted my heart watching them flit back and forth in the reeds, chittering and calling out to each other. I wish I had had my "real" camera with me and not just my cell phone so I could have captured some of their antics.  

Native phragmites
Not all phragmites is bad. Native phragmites hugs the coastal and interior wetlands in the Great Lakes region as well. It supports our native wildlife and lays the foundation for a biodiverse habitat, but it can easily be squeezed out by the non-native form. The invasive form creates dense thickets that kill wild rice, cattails, and wetland orchids, which all grow well around native phragmites.

Click here for a post by the Great Lakes Phragmites Collaborative to help you tell native and non-native phragmites apart.

Click here for a wonderful video created by the Tip of the Mitt Watershed Council that shows how to differentiate between the two types.

Click here for another site with information on phragmites and other Great Lakes Restoration projects.

Goats to the rescue?
In an article titled "The Goats Fighting America's Plant Invasion," by Joanna Jolly in BBC News Magazine (January 13, 2015), Jolly writes that marine biologist Brian Silliman of Duke University in North Carolina has been working over 20 years to figure out how to eradicate invasive phragmites. He tried insects and other forms of bio-control, but had no luck. Then after a trip to the Netherlands, he saw the plant wasn't a problem there because it was constantly being grazed by animals. Cue the goats! Silliman got to work and found goats can get the job done. In one study, 90% of the phragmites in the test area was eliminated. Click here to read the entire article.

Normally, we look for deer hiding along the boardwalk, but I would love to look for goats...


Click here for more of our Big Water (November at Maumee) posts.

Waterloo Recreation Area

...continued from the Ann Arbor posts.

With only an hour in between hockey games, I didn't have much time to look for birds, but I hit the road anyway. According to Jill the GPS Girl I was only 12 minutes away from Waterloo Recreation Area, so I thought I'd check it out. I'm glad I did. The place is huge (20,000+ acres)...and gorgeous! Jill led me to the Waterloo Headquarters easily enough, and after parking, I walked up to the large trail map posted outside the building. A trail picked up right off the parking area and looked like a perfect place to begin--until I saw a sign mentioning that "this trail goes through hunting areas." ----"Yikes!" Needless to say, since I was not wearing orange, I high-tailed it out of there and admonished Jill for taking me into the danger zone, recommending she did a little "recalculating..." of her own! Going the opposite direction fast, I followed the signs to the Eddy Discovery Center, happy to see lots of "No Hunting" signs posted along the way. The Discovery Center was closed, but the trails around it were beautiful, and I couldn't resist starting down the Hickory Hills Nature Trail.

...as soon as I stepped on the trail, a family of Black-capped Chickadees started calling all around me. Their call was sweet and noticeably different from our Carolina Chickadees, and as they sang their song, I could hear the differences there also. They were larger than our Carolinas (the tails especially seemed longer), and they had more white on the wings. Both Carolina and Black-capped Chickadees are reported to live in Cincinnati, but I've only seen Carolina Chickadees around our house.

Leaves were still mostly green, but here and there you could see chlorophyll production had stopped, draining the green from the leaves and letting the yellow, orange and red pigments of autumn show through.

The forest floor at the trail's edge was dark, stained even darker by the rain, highlighting the chartreuse green leaves of saplings.

...did you notice the name of the last trail? It caught my attention quickly! After seeing the spectacular array of birds at the Pinckney Island NWR this summer, anything with Pinckney in it had to be good. :-)